As I read the article, I was hearing "whine whine whine, students may pay twice what they borrowed ohh nooooeeeess - oh, by the way, we're not bothering about inflation's effects on the value of that money".
So I thought - OK, so they're talking about 25 or 30 years, here.
The worst example it cites is this:
The second student gets a £2,000 per year rise over and above average pay, and clears the debt completely in 25 years, paying a total of £83,791 in cash terms.
So, 25 years.
So I go and look at past data, 25 years ago was 1986.... I find a site that shows how UK prices have inflated since then... Well it only goes up to 2010 so let's look at 1985 to 2010. The price converter on
http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/ reckons that £39k in 1985 would be the same /real/ value as £90k in 2010.
So, really, if we make the (admittedly huge) assumption that inflation averages out to a fairly linear increase over the years - really, that 'second student' with the raw deal is actually paying back LESS than he or she borrowed in real terms.
Big deal, huh?
THIS is my beef with the article!